Take note, theologians; you run the risk of someday having to condemn as heretics those who declare as you do that the earth stands still.

–Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)

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Both Henri de Lubac and Galileo Galilei understood the changing nature of orthodoxy, as the magisterium of the Roman Catholic Church defines it.

De Lubac, born at Cambrai, France, on February 20, 1896, was a Jesuit. He joined the Society in Jesus in 1913. From 1914 to 1919 our saint served in the French Army. Afterward he studied theology, culminating in his ordination to the priesthood in 1927.

De Lubac’s life and theological standing had their ups and downs. He joined the faculty of the University of Lyons in 1929. Our saint, a neo-scholastic theologian, criticized certain aspects of Church teaching in the light of the Church Fathers, as in Catholicism (1938). In other words, he thought that the Church had, in some aspects, strayed from its foundations. That which conservatives (from a certain point of view) considered an ill-conceived innovation was actually a return to an older tradition. Then period of 1940-1944 was difficult for de Lubac, part of the resistance to both the direct Nazi occupation of part of France and the puppet French State, or the Vichy regime. After the liberation (1944) normal life resumed for our saint. In Surnaturel (1946) de Lubac argued against the false dichotomy between the natural and the supernatual with regard to human destinies. He stated that God had created people with inherent and natural openness to and desire for the supernatural. Simply put, according to our saint, the true human vocation is union with God.

De Lubac, a liberal pre-Vatican II and a conservative post-Vatican II, proved the argument that those labels are relative to the center and that, when the center moves, one’s label changes. Pope John Paul II (reigned 1978-2005) made our saint a cardinal in 1983.